Yorkshire Sculpture Park EVA ROTHSCHILD Resource File

Yorkshire Sculpture Park EVA ROTHSCHILD Resource ﬁle Eva Rothschild (born 1972) is an Irish artist based in London.

Rothschild was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her work references the art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Minimalism. She has used materials such as Plexiglas, leather and paper in her sculptural pieces and she also makes wall-based works and videos. In 2003 she selected EASTinternational with Toby Webster. She is represented by Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London.

Education 1997 – 1999 MA Fine Art, Goldsmith’s College, London 1990 – 1993 BA Hons Fine Art, University of Ulster, Belfast, Ireland

Solo Exhibitions 2011 The Hepworth, Wakeﬁeld Public Art Fund, New York, USA (forthcoming)

2009 Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain, London Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich, Switzerland Francesca Kaufmann, Milan, Italy La Conservera: Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Murcia

2008 Tate Britain, Millbank, London The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland

2007 South London Gallery, London 303 Gallery, New York, USA

2006 Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland

2005 Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Ireland Modern Art, London

2004 Kunsthalle, Zurich, Switzerland Artspace, Sydney, Australia

2003 Heavy Cloud, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland Sit-In, Galleria Francesca Kaufmann, Milan, Italy

2002 Modern Art, London Project Art Centre, Dublin, Ireland 2001 Eva Rothschild, Els Hannape Underground, Athens, Greece Peacegarden, The Showroom, London Peacegarden, Cornerhouse, Manchester, England Eva Rothschild, Francesca Kauﬀman Gallery, Milan, Italy

1999 Eva Rothschild, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland

1998 Eva Rothschild, Titanik Galerie, Turku

1996 Great Wall / Black Hole, Iain Irving Projects, Aberdeenshire Eva Rothschild, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Scotland

1995 Eva Rothschild, Bercsenyi Galleria, Budapest, Hungary

Selected Group Exhibitions

Awards / Commissions

2009 Tate Britain Annual Duveens’ Comission

2000 –2002 Delﬁna Trust, London, studio residency

2000 Camden Arts Centre, London, artist in residence

1997 PADT / BAA Heathrow Arts Programme, Belfast Lounge commission Independent Public Arts / Stirling Council, ‘National Flags’ project

1996 Scottish Arts Council, Amsterdam, studio residency

Publications

2009 Ruf, Beatrix, Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation, Phaidon Press, London, p. 252-253

2007 Unmonumental: Falling to Pieces in the 21st Century (exhibition catalogue), published by the New Museum and Phaidon

2006 Clarrie Wallis, Tate Triennial, exhibition catalogue, Tate Publishing, London All Hawaii Entrées / Lunar Reggae, (exhibition catalogue), published by Charta 2005 Eva Rothschild, Essay by Watson, Grant. 2005, (exhibition catalogue), published by The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin

2004 Eva Rothschild, Kunsthalle Zürich, (exhibtion catalogue), ublished by JRP Ringier Kunstverlag AG, Zurich, Switzerland The Carnegie International, (exhibition catalogue), published by The Carnegie Museum of Art

2002 Early One Morning, (exhibition catalogue), published by Whitechapel Art Gallery, London

2001 Peacegarden, (exhibition catalogue), published by Showroom Gallery, London

Selected Bibliograhy

2010 Cotton, Michelle. The Dark Monarch, Frieze, January-February, p. 122

2009 Coxhead, Gabriel. Exhibition Review, Time Out, July 23-29, p. 48 Duguin, Hannah. Women at work, Independent, August 28, p. 4-6 Cumming, Laura. Exhibition Review, The Observer, July 5 Exhibition Review, The Guardian Guide, July 4, p. 38 Exhibition Review, Evening Standard, June 29, p. 8 Cork, Richard. Eva Rothschild, Solid Geometry, Art World, June-July, p. 130-134 Adams, Stephen. Tate to install giant sculpture, The Daily Telegraph, March 31, p. 11 Baracaia, Alexa. Exhibition Review, The London Paper, March 30, p. 6 Jury, Louise. Exhibition Review, Evening Standard, March 30, p. 5

2008 Archer, Michael. Eva Rothschild: South London Gallery, ArtForum, January, p. 291-292 Van der Vlist, Eline, Eva Rothschild, Modern Painters, December-January, p. 97

2007 Hunt, Ian. They don’t unpack: Eva Rothschild interviewed by Ian Hunt, Art Monthly, November, p. 1-4 O’Reilly, Sally. Eva Rothschild: South London Gallery, Time Out, p. 46 Eva Rothschild, Dazed and Confused, October, p. 239 Jones, Kristin M. Eva Rothschild, Frieze, October, p. 287 Lubbock, Tom. Wire in the Blood, The Independent, September, p. 12-13

2006 O’Keeﬀe, Alice. New Britart stars spurn celebrity cult, The Observer, February 26, p. 13 Making a pile for art, The Journal, September 24

2005 O’Brian, Paul. Dublin: Eva Rothschild at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Circa 113, Autumn, p. 94-95 Keating, Sarah. Eva Rothschild and Rupert Spira, May 13-20 Sam, Sherman. Eva Rothschild: Modern Art 18 Mar-16 April, Map Magazine, Summer, p. 54-55 Leahy, Billy. Keeping the Faith, The Village Magazine, May 6-12, p. 59 Leen, Catherine, Eva Rothschild, The Sunday Times, May 1 2002 Grant, Catherine. _Early One Morning: Whitechapel, London, Flash Art, October, p. 49 Gayford, Martin. _A new generation of sculptors harks back to the Sixties, Sunday Telegraph, August Searle, Adrian. Early One Morning: Whitechapel Art Gallery, The Guardian, July 24 Dorment, Richard. Better that BritArt, The Daily Telegraph, July 17 Darwent, Charles. They’re a crafty bunch, sculptors, The Independent, July 14 O’Reilly, Sally. Review, Time Out London, May 15-22 Packer, William. Dawn of the morning after, The Financial Times, July 30

2001 Peacegarden, (exhibition catalogue), The Showroom Gallery, London Higgie, Jennifer. Paint it Black: Jennifer Higgie on Eva Rosthschild, Frieze, November/December, p. 78-79

Collections Tate Gallery, London Carnegie Museum Collection, Pittsburgh Arts Council Collection, London Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton Frieze Magazine Issue 110 October 2007

Eva Rothschild 303 Gallery, New York, USA

An alchemist of sorts, Eva Rothschild has created many lushly mysterious two-dimensional pieces by weaving together found posters, photographs and computer-generated patterns. Her first New York solo show offered one of these barely decipherable images, an eerily futuristic rondo in black and flourescent green titled The Back of Your Head (all works 2007), but it was dominated by a series of objects that radiated a tense, unsettling energy. Every bit as hybrid as the woven-paper works, these morphologically shape-shifting sculptures incorporated organic and inorganic materials, including leather, Perspex, wood, tiles and aluminium; some of them combined angular with sinuous forms. Flexible or hanging elements recalled post-Minimalism, while sleek quasi-geometric structures hinted at Minimalist DNA. Several evoked the trappings of various ideologies, countercultures and religions, including New Age and the occult.

Some emitted a disturbing emotionalism, including two dramatic, black-lacquered works: Ordinary Me and Magical You, a horizontal, diamond-shaped wall piece with bars extending from its sides and tangling in the centre, and Blackout, an arrangement of three triangles pointing upwards: one open and two solid with hexagonal cut-outs, and a pair of hexagons, like crystals spilling from a pyramid. Other objects were humorous in a way that recalled some of Eva Hesse’s work, although they radically depart from Hesse’s anxious Modernism with their glossy elegance, whiff of Gothic mystification and placing of spiritual and emotional angst in quotation marks. Hesse, of course, strove for her sculptures to offer no more than what was materially present, whereas Rothschild is preoccupied with precisely the opposite: her work explores how objects acquire meanings that are extraneous to the objects’ material reality. In an interview with Andrea Tarsia of the Whitechapel Art Gallery she remarked, ‘I’m interested in the ways of looking that go with concepts of faith and in how things are invested with a power above and beyond their materiality, the transference of spirituality onto objects’.

A spectral need to believe seems literally to hold aloft White Wedding, whose title perhaps alludes to the eponymous Billy Idol song, with its sepulchral tones and lyrics dripping with sarcasm and disillusionment. A hula-hoop-like ring wrapped in braided black and white leather from which long fringes spill onto the ﬂoor, it appears to be suspended in mid-air. It may evoke the ancient concept of a ‘cosmic marriage’ between the earthly and the terrestrial, but its title hints that such a union would be essentially hollow; here, if opposites come together, it is in a vaguely ominous shotgun wedding. This work suggests symbolism ascribed to circles in various religious and art-historical traditions, including Native American art, circles as emblems of totality, unity, heaven, perfection – or, sometimes, nothingness. Formally, this enigmatic show-stopper echoes a pivotal Hesse work, Untitled (1965), in which she dangled a length of painted and cord-covered hose from a ring wrapped with cord and painted with enamel. But White Wedding embraces the polish, neatness and beauty that Hesse eschewed in pursuit of the awkward, comical and absurd.

Elegance, narrative, decorativeness, anthropomorphism – these bugaboos of much 1960s and ’70s art all come into play in Rothschild’s objects. At times her work calls to mind Michael Fried’s musings on the latter in his 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’. He wrote that ‘the apparent hollowness of most literalist work – the quality of having an inside – is almost blatantly anthropomorphic. It is, as numerous commentators have remarked approvingly, as though the work in question has an inner, even secret life.’ This once-hidden anthropomorphism, real or imagined, seems to burst out of the sleek surfaces of many of Rothschild’s pieces – here most notably in All for You, which includes a giant shape, lumpy as a rotten apple, covered in slick-black, shard-like tiles. Suggesting a bulbous, sagging head, it connects to an arc of black, green-and-brown striped tubing ending in a fork that rests delicately on the ﬂoor like two pathetic legs. The misshapen form telegraphs abjection – as does the title – though the extreme listlessness seems somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Other titles suggest self-abnegation, such as Ordinary Me and Magical You or Kindness, seeming to allude to self-eﬀacement as an ingredient of belief (whether for good or ill doesn’t seem to be the issue).

Twins comprises an open pedestal supporting – or being invaded by – tangled tubing. In Kindness a more orderly looping form rests on a pedestal. These, along with other works – such as the black- lacquered pieces, which conjure up a Kenneth Anger-style magick – hinted at a privileging of the imagination and emphasis on metamorphosis, as though the Romantic tradition were yet another belief system to be mined.

Kristin M. Jones

EMPIRE: EVA ROTHSCHILD March 1 – August 28, 2011, at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York.

Eva Rothschild (b. Dublin, 1971), has earned a reputation as one of Great Britain’s leading sculptors. Her compelling geometric and irregular constructions employ a diverse range of materials such as metal, glass, leather, Perspex, and mosaic. Highlights of her extensive exhibition history include Cold Corners, Tate Britain Duveens Commission, Tate Britain, London (solo show, 2009); South London Gallery, London (solo show, 2007); Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich (solo show, 2004), and Un-Monumental: Falling to Pieces in the 21st Century, The New Museum, New York (group show, 2007). In spring 2011, Eva Rothschild’s solo exhibition will inaugurate the United Kingdom’s newly opened museum The Hepworth Wakeﬁeld. Her work is included in the collections of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and Tate, London. Rothschild lives and works in London.

In Empire, her ﬁrst public art commission in the United States, Irish artist Eva Rothschild (b. Dublin, 1971) has created a monumental, multidirectional archway. Responding to the site, a point of transition between city and park, Rothschild has taken inspiration from the naturally arching canopy formed by Central Park’s mature trees. The linear structure takes root at ten points on the plaza, touching down lightly as its branching form rises above us.

Empire creates a physical tension between its imposing volume and its spidery, intersecting elements, which are further broken up by irregular bands of color. With its pulsing visual energy, the sculpture suggests multiple images — perhaps the tail of a broomstick or a bolt of lightning. We are free to make our own associations. Rothschild’s chosen title, Empire, resonates with the location of her new work: the heart of the “Empire State.” At the same time, we might consider the sculpture as a playful counterpoint to the architectural tradition of the monumental arch, a structure often used historically to represent the triumph of an imperial power. Eva Rothschild - Cold Corners Tate Britain Duveens Commission 2009 Supported by Sotheby’s 30 June - 29 November 2009 By Claire Breukel

This year the Duveen Gallery Annual Commission was awarded to British sculptress Eva Rothschild. Comprised of twenty-six adjoining triangles, Rothschild’s piece entitled Cold Corners, is a site speciﬁc intervention, or rather interjection, into the vast space of this nineteenth century Neo Classical passageway of the Tate Britain.

“Not another 1960’s minimalist intervention in a space” was the ﬁrst response walking in to the expanse of marble and catching a glimpse of the tangled framework of glossy black scalene and isosceles. Although the piece is obviously Minimalist in physicality, it has a presence that is curiously captivating and strangely poetic as if spelling out a number of words that make up a story, or a series of movements that contribute to a dance.

Studying the ﬁrst splayed-out form in a series that expands the length of the extended passageway, one cannot help but begin to wander through the piece. Realizing that this was not of ordinary instinctual habit, but rather the works clever engineering and a latent dynamism forcing one to engage in progressive steps – one navigates on. It is these steps that create a consecutive narrative allowing both for closer inspection of the black metal form at that moment, as well as a response to the structure in ﬂuid motion.

This sense of flow may be attributed to the thin aluminum flux metal the triangles are made of— appearing at points as if floating—especially in opposition to the heavy classical columns and marble of their surroundings. However, this contrast is complicated by the work’s construction: rigid shapes that are neither an obvious opposition to the space, nor a responsive organic molding to the building’s architecture. Instead Rothschild has chosen a position in the middle. Jutting triangular corners are suspended in space; some points appear falling, and others climb the momentous columns, whilst some embrace and support, finally lightly tapping the ground as if pausing for an instant before moving to the next act. The rigid triangles contrast their weightless materiality, letting the sculpture flow, as if each triangular segment has grown from the last like an ordered and controlled, yet growing vine. It is this middle position of being both structured and vibrant, that places us in a position of discomfort and wonder.

Born in Dublin in 1971, Rothschild went on to complete her BA at the University of Ulster in Belfast, after which she completed her MA at the prestigious Goldsmiths College in London, where she lives and works. Throughout her career, Rothschild has built a body of work that shows her vastly adept at using the language of sculpture. Cold Corners is her largest work to date and through both its scale and its use of everyday material, Rothschild has created a powerful presence in its contrast. Too ﬁercely independent to be site-speciﬁc, Cold Corners is a fascinating and complex experience born from being an innate oxymoron.